HOPE, RESURRECTED
This Easter is the first since 2019 that families can freely celebrate, after the pandemic. A time of spiritual rebirth, renewal and reaffirmation, this weekend now takes on an extra resonance as we emerge from the shadow of Covid and look forward, however tentatively, to possessing that most precious of commodities: normality
IT is Good Friday. It also happens, this year, to be my birthday. The day is soft and warm. The lark sings high overhead. New lambs bounce about the adjacent crofts and every ditch is wriggly with tadpoles.
But, best of all, this Easter weekend is normal. We are all but free of the restrictions that made Easter 2021 so unpleasant – and the horrors of Easter 2020, mocked by the most beautiful spring weather and when you could taste the fear in the air, are a fast-receding memory.
We could not even visit parents or grandparents. Meet friends even in the garden. We queued timidly outside supermarkets; took our single, permitted daily outing as police cars roamed the suburbs.
Groceries we had taken for granted since the war – flour, yeast, eggs – became all but unobtainable. We tuned timorously into Downing Street briefings; did our best to divert bewildered children; binge-watched Normal People; learned to Zoom and drank too much.
Even at the height of the Blitz, we could always pop down to our local for a pint or, on Sundays, gather to worship the Prince of Peace.
Now, in these long sunny days as the ambulances wailed and our dead were buried by men in space suits, both were forbidden. Churches the length of the land were closed. Stoups of holy water drained at the decree of Catholic bishops.
There could be no confirmations, no First Communions. No children’s addresses by the parish minister, full of allusions to chocolate and awful puns about eggs. It might have been your Easter Monday rite, as a family, to picnic by Loch Lomond, paddle at North Berwick or take the wee ones to Largs for ice-cream.
NOW such things were not allowed. You were told not to travel more than five miles from home and on no account to leave your local authority area. Above all, we were told to protect the NHS by not using it.
When some respite came, it was the oddest feeling. On making a work-related trip to Glasgow, last March, I found at Central Station I had all but forgotten how to use an escalator. On the first morning of June 2020 liberation, I saw a gaggle of teenage boys gather shyly on the next street.
It is not an age for emotion and they could not touch, but they were very pink and with goofy smiles, and could not hide their joy at being allowed to meet again.
But, this Easter, we can go places and have folk round for drinks and barbecues. We can at last hug Granny; meet at the Kirk to raise our voices in Christian hymn. It is, once more, a weekend for hope.
Easter, famously, is a ‘moveable feast’. That is because Christ was crucified at the Feast of the Passover, which is calculated by the Jewish calendar – a lunar one, with 12 months of 28 days.
Easter Sunday must be the day after the paschal full moon, on a Saturday. It can be as early, then, as March 22, or as late as April 25. (We last had an Easter that late in 1943: there will not be another one until 2038.)
This has long annoyed some who think Parliament should, you know, do something and have Easter on a fixed date every year, like the Queen’s official birthday.
But the floating date of Easter is a big part of its charm. And dispute over the correct date has had serious consequences.
It was a big factor in the 664 AD Synod of Whitby, when these islands, thanks to some fast-talking clergy, turned their back on the Celtic Church and embraced Roman Catholicism.
Far more gravely, in 1053 the disputed date of Easter was one of a cluster of issues that split the Church from East to West, in what has gone down in history as the Great Schism. The rift has never been healed and Orthodox believers in Greece, Russia and so on still keep Easter later than us – April 24, this year.
We forget today, that in Scotland such was the totality of the 1560 Reformation that Easter – like Christmas and the rest – was simply abolished. It is still not celebrated in the smaller, evangelical Presbyterian denominations.
This Lord’s Day will be kept as any other and the argument is – and it has some force – that every Sabbath is a celebration of the Resurrection. For it was on the first day of the week that Christ rose from the dead after three days in the tomb, and Sunday has been kept as the Christian Sabbath ever since.
It is this forward energy of Easter that makes it special.
Christmas, marked by darkening days and old pagan fears of the night, wolves, whispering pine forests and the unquiet coffin has dark notes underpinning it. It’s basically a ‘phew’ moment when we sense the days starting to lengthen and that we have, after all, enough food to keep us till spring. It has also, of course, become dreadfully commercialised.
New Year is retrospective. (Our grannies could be relied upon to come up with a roll call of the last 12 months’ dead.)
BUT Easter looks forward. Forward to unfolding summer, the empty tomb, the risen Saviour, the Second Coming and the life to come, free at last, and for always, from a world sin has so spoiled.
In other Christian traditions it is also the end of Lent. Priests put off their purple vestments of mourning. The faithful can once more resume the pet indulgence they had from Shrove Tuesday to put aside and, to the traditional greeting as you gather for Mass or Holy Communion – ‘Christ is risen’ – the reverent response is, ‘He is risen indeed.’
And, in a fascinating echo of the Passover, from Her Majesty down, many of us will enjoy roast lamb this Sunday – though not, like our Jewish friends, standing up, dressed for travel, and with the traditional accompaniment of bitter herbs and a scorched egg of their Seder, after a reverent start of unleavened bread.
The Queen is always at Windsor for this time of year – it is called ‘Easter Court’ – and all gathered Royals sit down to a special breakfast: plain boiled eggs with fresh bread, butter and honey.
‘And after breakfast,’ confides Royal biographer Ingrid Seward, ‘there will be a little exchange of Easter gifts, though never anything particularly expensive. Usually they give small pretty presents like hand-painted bone china boxes with hinged lids. The chef makes hot cross buns and the family goes to St George’s Chapel – but, unlike Christmas, there is no set time to gather’.
That eggs have long been associated with both rites, Easter and Passover, is striking. For both, the hatching egg symbolises renewal; new begin
nings. In Christian teaching, Christ was not ‘raised’ by some third party, as He himself in the Gospel narrative, from the Widow of Nain’s son to his close friend Lazarus, raised others from the dead.
He arose by His own power, threw open His own tomb, set the grave clothes neatly aside. There is striking contrast to the miracle of Lazarus. Men had to open that tomb first, and Lazarus emerged still bound in the banded cloths of death. Jesus was different. He was through with death for ever, and – for Christian believers – the sting of death was spent in Him.
And it is indeed true – and I confirmed it once in my own experience – that you must never help a chick to hatch, however protracted the struggle or piteous the cheeping. This is something it needs to do, as if to sign and seal its own will to live, and if you peel eggshell off in a bid to assist, it will simply die.
Despite the best endeavours, too, of the chocolate egg producers, Easter has otherwise and to substantial degree resisted the commercialisation of its winter sister.
But there is one striking difference between the two main traditions of Christianity.
For Catholics, Easter, and one’s daily living faith, is very much about the Passion. You have a crucifix above your bed. You walk the Stations of the Cross. The iconography is overwhelmingly of a dead Saviour, pale, passive, wounded, seemingly defeated.
In Protestantism, the Christian cross bears no tortured Christ. Historically the pulpit, not an altar, was central to Presbyterian churches. And, at Easter and indeed each Lord’s Day, we gather to hail the Risen Lord, ‘Who,’ as the Apostle Paul wrote to the believers in Rome, ‘was delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification.’
There are broadly three understandings of the Gospel. One is inherent righteousness. Everyone is basically good, there is no such thing as original sin, and we just need to be nicer to each other.
Even today – though their congregations are fast emptying – versions of this faith (the technical term is Pelagianism) are still preached.
Then there is infused righteousness. You physically receive Christ in the Mass, and are thereby saved.
THE Protestant understanding is imputed righteousness. The Sinless One became the sin-bearer. The justice of God was spent on Him – from the agony of Gethsemane to the final cry of ‘It is finished’ – and, as a poor but righteous man once said, ‘He die. Me no die’.
The Resurrection was the vindication: proof that the Triune God was satisfied with the sacrifice at Calvary. And it was also the birth of the New Testament Church – and on very different lines to the old one.
Men and women were not segregated. Circumcision of boys gave way to baptism for all. Animal sacrifices – a foreshadowing of the Cross – at once ceased and even the requirement for a ‘minyan’ – the minimum quorum of males necessary for public worship to be held – was rescinded.
But all this hinges on a man who was indubitably, utterly dead and came back emphatically to life. Who was seen by dozens of people. On one occasion, by more than 500 people.
Jesus’s disciples, hours before the Cross, scattered for their lives and disowned him. Yet the same men, days later – having seen the risen Christ – were preaching to all who would listen. They would brave imprisonment, beatings, torture, and even death itself rather than worship the Emperor, succumb to the High Priest or deny that Jesus was risen indeed.
The Gospel will never be a popular message. To many, it is positively ridiculous and even Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, observed, ‘For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.’
Of course it is good to enjoy days off work, an outing to Largs, a paddle on the beach and time with the children.
I too shall lay in a gigot and, in the course of the weekend, some chocolate may well be harmed in the making of that movie.
But beyond family happiness, balmy spring, new beginnings and the core doctrine of the Christian faith, blessed, regained normality stands.